Rock Springs Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's what the marker at Rock Springs Cemetery has to say, and I'll tell it to you straight. Well, as straight as a good story allows. Out here in Parker County, there's a piece of ground that remembers a village most folks have forgotten.

Rock Springs, they called it: a social center, a gathering place for the farmers who worked this land. Not a big town, mind you, but the kind of place that mattered to the people who needed it. The cemetery is one of the few remnants left of that community.

And cemeteries, as any Texan worth his boots will tell you, have a way of keepin' score. Thirty-one graves are marked with native stones; no imported marble, no fancy monuments, just the rock this country already had layin' around. A few graves have engraved headstones, but most of the people restin' here trusted the land itself to remember them.

The earliest marked identifiable grave belongs to Mary L. Sullivan, dated 1867. She was the first.

And for fifteen years, Rock Springs kept on; farmers kept farmin', neighbors kept gatherin', and the village kept bein' what it was. Then came 1882. That's the year the town of Peaster was established, one mile west.

One mile. And that same year, the last marked grave in this cemetery was laid: Mary J. Robertson.

Rock Springs began to decline. Two names bookend this place. Mary L.

Sullivan opened the record in 1867. Mary J. Robertson closed it in 1882.

Fifteen years of a community's life, held between two stones. The village is gone. But the cemetery is still here, out in Parker County, native stones and all; one of the few remnants of something that once mattered quite a lot to the people who called it home.

What the marker says

This cemetery contains the graves of many of the pioneers of Rock Springs, a village that served as a social center for area farmers. Thirty-one graves are marked with native stones, while a few are identified with engraved headstones. The earliest marked identifiable grave, dated 1867, is that of Mary L. Sullivan. The last marked grave in the cemetery, that of Mary J. Robertson, bears the date 1882, the same year the town of Peaster (1 mile west) was established and Rock Springs began to decline. The cemetery is one of the few remnants of this early Parker County Community. (1985)